George Packer

George Packer "became a staff writer for The New Yorker in 2003 and has covered the Iraq War for the magazine. His book “The Assassins’ Gate: America in Iraq,” was named one of the ten best books of 2005 by the New York Times and won the New York Public Library’s Helen Bernstein Book Award and an Overseas Press Club’s book award. He has also written about the atrocities committed in Sierra Leone, civil unrest in the Ivory Coast, the megacity of Lagos, and global counterinsurgency. In 2003, Packer was awarded two Overseas Press Club awards, one for his twenty-thousand-word examination of the difficulties faced during the occupation and reconstruction of Iraq, which appeared in November, 2003, and the other for his coverage of the civil war in Sierra Leone, which appeared in January, 2003.

"Packer is also the author of “The Village of Waiting,” (1988), about his experience in Africa. His book “Blood of the Liberals,” (2000), a three-generational nonfiction history of his family and American liberalism in the twentieth century, won the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award. He has also written two novels, “The Half Man” (1991) and “Central Square,” (1998).

"Packer has served in the Peace Corps, in Togo, West Africa, and was a 2001-02 Guggenheim Fellow. He has contributed numerous articles, essays, and reviews on foreign affairs, American politics, and literature to the New York Times Magazine, Dissent, Mother Jones, Harper's, and other publications. He has taught writing at Harvard, Bennington, and Columbia."


 * 2006 Honorable Mention, Council on Foreign Relations: Arthur Ross Book Award

Books

 * George Packer (ed), The Fight Is for Democracy: Winning the War of Ideas in America and the World (Perennial, 2003). Contributors included: Michael Tomasky, Laura Secor, Vijay Seshadri, Todd Gitlin, Kanan Makiya, Susie Linfield, William Finnegan, Jeff Madrick, and Paul Berman)

Recent Articles

 * "Drowning: Can the Burmese people rescue themselves?", The New Yorker, August 25, 2008.

Critics

 * Edward Herman, "George Packer and the Struggle to Support Imperialism," ZNet Commentary, January 28, 2005.
 * Edward Herman, "The Liberals Answer Tony Judt's "Useful Idiots" Charge", Znet, October 24, 2006.

Related Sourcewatch articles

 * Iraq Study Group: Officials Interviewed